Providing practical applications of the vision of the Spiritual World, that can be used in realistic ways in ordinary, everyday life. Dedicated to The Way of Universal Love and the Ministry of Total Healing - Spiritual, Emotional, and Physical.

Sunday, April 09, 2006

It is a pleasure to be "patient" when important issues, such as understanding and wisdom, are involved and at stake. I will always try to approach any question with unhurried attention and a single focus.:)

You speak in your note of "anger and frustration at The One for being more than I can comprehend..." This is similar to a bee stinging you because he does not understand the human mind. When the bee stings, he dies. He could continue to live if he did not use all this energy to express anger. Anger is energy-draining, and weakens us. In Kung Fu training, it is repeatedly taught that anger weakens you by draining your energy, even though, in the short term, it seems actually to make you stronger. This is because it takes large amounts of energy and expends it within moments. With a little thought, you can see how this drains you in the long run.

The same is true mentally and emotionally. Anger drains us, making us weaker and more vulnerable. Consistent or chronic anger actually weakens the immune-system, for example-- a fact demonstrated by immunology.

You write, "I can stay stuck in my anger or let it go and move on." That is exactly your choice. If you do "let it go," you will have all that extra energy recycled back into your system, to be used and directed as you select. You can use the recycled angerenergy as Lovenergy, kinetic energy (for movement and exercise), emotional energy, dreamenergy, or an abundance of other forces in life.

You write, "I adore the idea of striving to be a being of Love (even in regard to The One)." This is, by far, the supreme challenge of all spirituality. In reaching for this goal, we have set before us ultimate expansion, an endless path, to be a vessel for the Absolute, filled with Her, and, in final fulfillment, to become Her "stainless mirror." There is no more excellent or superb aim for any sentient being.

You write, "That is what I choose to focus my energy upon." This is the most excellent and superb goal of which human beings are capable. And we are capable of this only because of grace, for it is really God within us reaching for a greater vision of Herself, by looking into the stainless mirror of our personal being. This occurs only when our "personal"selves disappear into the One, when we fade as ego into the Infinite, surrendering absolutely everything to Love.

You write, "Beyond that, I will have to let go of the questions for now." No, my friend, you certainly need not simply "let go" of the questions; keep asking them, and we will together seek answers. But you do not want to let them become obstacles to your spiritual growth, your immediate departure upon the spiritual highway. Questions are good and healthy, because they present an active and growing mind. Please just do not allow them to be an "anchor" that pulls you to the bottom. Instead, let them be wings that carry you into the higher skies of Mind.

You write, "As you have pointed out, they are childish and uselessly combative." They can be childish, but "combative" is a word that would not have occurred to me. Now, I can see that they could also be that. It seems that there are questions that might paralyze or petrify you, and questions that will lift you into new areas of wisdom, understanding, and comprehension. Those above the level of human knowledge can be discussed, but not always answered. We can still make "good guesses" re questions to which we might not have absolute answers. That is part of the fun and captivating fascination of spiritual development.

So, keep asking those questions, and never let anyone stop you. Seeking is the first step to finding.*******

Divine and Maternal Love*******

The great Being of compassion and Love is continuously trying to "shake us awake" from the "nightmare" of every day life. But, unlike an earthly mother, She/He has vowed not to interfere with our freewill lifedesign. So, we are created to awaken as slowly or as quickly as we build into our personal karma. So, divine Love has built into it many factors that mere human Love does not encompass, including some restrictions and limitations. It would be excessively foolish and careless for us to judge divine Love by exactly the same criteria by which we measure humanor maternal Love.

The One also realizes, with crystalline clarity, how much of our suffering is sheerest illusion, and that our only hope for genuine peace and Love is to discover for ourselves what "truth" (Reality) really is.We behave like arrested and backwards creatures if we allow ourselves to be carried away with our tiny emotions, even human Love, and start demanding what Love "should" and "should not" do, for we are amoebas passing judgment on a Love so vast and so intricate that we cannot even begin to understand Its vastness and immensity. It is not at all accurate or viable to compare this enormous Love to the Love felt by a mother for her child, even though there are precise analogies possible within this framework. (Still others are predictably invalid, however.)*******

The Existence of "Evil"*******

Outside of mind-created dream-illusion, evil cannot have an absolute existence.

But its relative existence is real. War, child-molestation, cruelty, murder, hurt and harm of all sorts do indeed exist within the holographic world. It is, in fact, the distinction between real mental evil and real mental good that serves as the major guideline of the Enlightenment Tradition. Not that the Tradition needs evil to define good; that is an extreme. But the existence of contraries such as "good and evil" allow us rationally and reasonably to choose the good and reject the evil. So, you are right: One of the more minor reasons for the existence of evil is to push minds towards the good.

Still, the underlying philosophy of the Way is "monism." Stated simply, this is the philosophy that holds that only one Mind actually exists, and that It has no real opposite.

If this is so, and the One Mind is Love, as we mystics hold, we must find out how the hell that evil can possibly serve Love! Happily, this is not quite as absurd as it does appear on first glance. Here is the spiritual chain of events:

We must here go all the way back to the beginning of souls, before bodies or worlds even existed. When individual souls (Mind-units) were emanated (were projected, dreamed) by the One, it was so that they could have fun. For lack of a better term, the cosmos gets "boring" when there is only the One. All that the One has is Mind; He/She, and all the cosmos, are only Mind, and so, filled everyewhere with Mind ("omnipresence"). So, in the Mind, the One begins the great dream.

He/She dreams the cosmos into being. He/She has already willed that other beings break apart, symbolically but never really, from him/herself. He/She is a joyous, playful puppeteer at this time, butHe/She has willed the Mind into perfect amnesia. He/She has exercised the unlimited Power ("omnipotence") to will those other parts of the One to forget that they are "one with the One."

This is all part of the "game" of the cosmos. It is an interesting, and harmless, way to have fun. In Hindu mysticism, it is called lila ("playing"). For innumerable eons, utterly past imagination, the souls play and love each other as cosmic beings of enormous Power, forgetting that they are the One.

Then the dream of the "material, physical" world begins. These superbeings play, pretend, and dream that they are actually creatures of material structure-- "flesh" is what the ancient mystics called it. This is patterned after animalnature.

They play and love together for countless eons. But some fall so far into the dream, and take the dream so seriously, that they actually forget that they are minds at all-- eternal, limitless minds. (ThisHindu mystics called "being swallowed by the serpent of maya.") They forget also that the world is a dream. Like lower forms of life, they become territorial and fearful. While before, in "paradise," everything that was mine and yours was "ours," now, private property emerges as a major illusion. Then the vicious infection of materialism occurs, as a disease. With it, all forms of avidya (ignorance) appear. This major shift of consciousness, falling into illusion as a trap, is described in the gnostic myth as the Goddess Sophia's falling into matter. It is also allegorized as the "Cain and Abel" story in Genesis.

Once people forget their true nature through ignorance, the chain of karma is forged. (Don't forget that the Great Forgetting was also a part of the will of the One, which never loses control, and which is perfect Love). And it is the chain of unavoidable cause-and-effect, founded upon greed-illusion, which naturally creates every form of karma, representing as "evil."

But this evil is not absolute evil. It is not directly created by perfect Mind, but it is permitted as part of the dream. (This is the theological distinction between the "active" and "permissive" will of God. It is still one will, undivided, but manifests in these two ways.) For all evil is "outside" of God; since God fills, and is, all Reality, anything "outside" of this Lovemind must be its opposite-- unreality or illusion.

So, to make a long story interminable-- all evil results from thousands of years of ignorance, error, and illusion. Even genetic factors are included in "karmogenetics." This all is collectively called karma. (The Greek word for "sin," in the Christian Scriptures, equates "sin" with "error," not with evil. So, sin is error, not evil.) But "deliberate error" is impossible, an oxymoron. Also, only deliberate, voluntary, consciously evil behavior (that designed to harm another) creates karma. Mistakes or errors, no matter how abundant, do not create any karma in one who has a pure heart. The interior Christ always and continuously says to those of pure heart, "All your sins are forgiven." At times, only the One knows the difference between "voluntary" and involuntary. That is why we cannot judge the total value of a person based only on her visible behaviors.

In sum, all evil has a cause-- former illusion-based evil. Evil comes back from previous evil, originally generated by ignorance. That is why mystics are so big on the rejection of ignorance. As we strive to replace ignorance with Love, we gently, gradually, incrementally erase all our old karma, lessening or decreasing that of the whole world. But many have not found this lesson, and the world is still filled to brimming, glutted with destructive karma.

Since this karma can be hideous and nightmarish, how can we manage ever to regard it as "good"? As noted, the mystic has a clear-sighted interior sense of right and wrong, good and evil. For this duality, like evil, is real and genuine in this limited world, although neither has absolute existence.

The purpose of karma is to teach Love. People put themselves through some quite ghastly hells of hate, fear, and other non-Love states in order to learn Love. (The state of believing yourself to be outside of, or without, Love is the essence of "hell.") They create enormous and very convincing hellstates everywhere. One of the best, and strongest, ways to teach the value of Love is to allow a person to fall into the illusion that she is without, completely separate from, Love. Then, when she awakens to the reality that she is Love, that Love immerses and saturates her, that Love is in fact the only Reality ("truth") in the entire cosmos, she is ecstatic. she touches bliss, a characteristic ofthe Coremind, Lovemind, or God/Goddess.*******

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About Me

Teacher, author, psychospiritual advisor, life-design consultant, and practicing mystic. Founder of agapology, the science of love-psychology. Spokesperson for the Universal Love Movement (not a religion, but a Way) which challenges society to live by the principles of compassion, acceptance, and tolerance. Founder of the Institute of Agapology and Metaphysics in Cincinnati, Ohio. For psychospiritual study-aids, please visit the book section at www.loveministries.org.